Instead, he witnessed inhumane conditions, torture, and had his life threatened inside the squalid prison.

On August 22, 12 members of Afghanistan‘s CID police stormed a suburban house with guns drawn, arresting Punton and three women.

“I can honestly say I thought I was going to die when the police stormed the house. There was a huge explosion, and initially I thought it was a bomb,” Punton said. “At first, I thought they were screaming ‘Taliban!’, so I ran to get my bulletproof vest.

“Then I recognised they were plain-clothes officers from the Afghan CID – the local version of the CIA.

“An army officer came in pointing an AK-47 at me, and I thought that was it: I was going to be put to death.”In jail, Punton survived on one cup of rice a day and shed 17kg.

Accused of rape, having a relationship with a Muslim woman and spying, he was eventually released without charge after paying CID police $40,000. After Punton’s release, the Australian Embassy helped hide him under an assumed name before he flew out of Afghanistan to Dubai, then back to Australia in October.

“The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is aware of the case and our consular officials in Kabul provided the detained Australian man with consular assistance,” a spokeswoman said.

Until his release, Punton’s parents had left a non-government organisation official in Afghanistan in charge of release negotiations in agreement with Australian consular officials.

Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai announced his second-term cabinet last Saturday, retaining roughly half of his incumbent ministers, including US favorites, while appointing figures tied to Afghan warlords: here.

Two-thirds of Afghan war veterans are suffering from hearing damage: here.

Britain: Military families and former soldiers will travel from across the country on Monday to demand that Gordon Brown brings the troops home from Afghanistan: here.

New Delhi, Dec 19 Describing the US troop surge in war-torn Afghanistan as a “terrible mistake”, a Pulitzer prize winning American author and an ardent Gandhi admirer Saturday said war cannot be ended by war.

“It was a terrible mistake to extend the war in Afghanistan,” said Alice Walker, an eminent American writer who was active in the 1960s civil rights movement and has also fought for women’s issues and for the cause of the poor in the US.

“You cannot end war by perpetuating war,” said the author, best known for her novel “The Color Purple”, for which she won the Pulitzer in 1983.

The book on black women’s life during the 1930s in the US, addresses numerous issues including their low status in the American social ladder.

Walker was in India as a guest of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations and the Gandhi Smriti and Samiti, which felicitated the author at the Gandhi museum — where the Mahatma spent the last 144 days of his life and was assassinated Jan 30, 1948.

A non-violent activist and Gandhi follower, Walker was arrested during an anti-war protest rally outside the White House March 8, 2003, on the eve of the Iraq war.

Asked if she wasn’t contradicting herself by saying the Afghan war was a mistake and feeling happy about Obama getting the Nobel, Walker said: “This is the way to try and move him (Obama) in a direction we would want him. This will remind him that the people expect him to make moves about peace.”

Another UK soldier killed in Afghanistan, making 203 this year. Killing and being killed for what?

USA: While the Army is fighting two wars overseas, they’re also fighting a rising number of suicides. This year is the highest number of reported cases since 1980, when the Army began keeping statistics: here.

Skull fragments of prehistoric koalas from the Riversleigh rainforests of millions of year ago suggest they shared the modern koala‘s “lazy” lifestyle and ability to produce loud “bellowing” calls to attract mates and provide warnings about predators.

The shift to a wholly eucalyptus diet by modern koalas was an adaptation that probably came later as Australia drifted north, causing its rainforests to retreat and Eucalypts to become the dominant tree of most Australian forests and woodlands.

Modern koalas – the sole living member of the diprotodontian marsupial family Phascolarctidae –are among the largest of all arboreal leaf-eaters. To attain this remarkable condition on a diet of eucalyptus leaves, a notoriously poor and somewhat toxic food source, the tree-dwelling marsupials developed unique anatomical and physiological adaptations including specialized chewing and digestive anatomies and a highly sedentary lifestyle. The dramatic differences between the skulls of extinct and modern koalas, especially in the facial region, are probably related to the change to a tougher diet of eucalyptus leaves.

The fossil species were unearthed from the Riversleigh World Heritage site in Queensland, Australia. The comparisons reveal similarities in the back of the skull between the modern and fossil koalas, but substantial differences in their teeth, palate and jaws.

Koalas are most closely related among living marsupials to wombats but the two species diverged some 30-40 million years ago. Among fossil koalas there are 18 named species representing five genera spanning the period from the late Oligocene (37 million years ago) to the present.

However, they are generally scarce in the fossil record and most species are only known from a few isolated teeth or jaw fragments. Therefore, it has been difficult to develop an accurate picture of their behaviour, diet and evolution.

The researchers believe that the prehistoric koalas also shared with their modern cousins the ability to produce loud “bellows” based on similar large bony prominences – the auditory bullae – that enclose structures in the middle and inner ear. However the auditory bullae of the extinct Nimiokoala and Litokoala species are not as exaggerated as in the modern koala, according to team member UNSW Professor Mike Archer.

“Modern koalas are extremely sedentary and vocal animals,” says Archer, who is perhaps best known for leading research into the extraordinary Riversleigh fossil deposits in Queensland, which led to the site being listed on the World Heritage Register.

“They produce low frequency vocalisations that pass through vegetation and can be heard up to 800 metres away – far exceeding the home range limits of male koalas. The fossil koalas share similar large bony ear structures to the modern koala and would have been well adapted to detecting vocalisations in the rainforest environment of Riversleigh in the Miocene era.”

“In order to accommodate both the mechanical demands of their new diet, as well as maintaining their auditory sophistication, the koala underwent substantial changes to its cranial anatomy, in particular that of the facial skeleton,” says Dr Julien Louys of UNSW’s School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences. “The unique cranial configuration of the modern koala is therefore the result of accommodating their masticatory adaptations without compromising their auditory system.”

Giant marsupials, reptiles and flightless birds that once roamed Australia became extinct about 40,000 years ago, later than had been thought and some 5,000 years after humans arrived, a new study suggests: here.

A coalition of community environmental groups has been trying to stop logging in the Mumbulla State Forest in the NSW far south east, with a blockade of about 90 people. The forest contains the last known koala colony between Canberra and Victoria: here.

June 2010: The reintroduction of 20 red-tailed phascogales into Kojonup Reserve in South-West Australia at the end of last represents another step towards preserving the endangered animal’s future. Twelve females and eight males were released into the reserve as part of the Threatened Fauna Ark Project: here.

Paleontologists have unearthed a nearly complete skeleton of a Diprotodon, a fearsome three-ton wombat that rampaged across Australia some 2.5 million years ago until the arrival of the first humans: here.

A STUDY OF ANCIENT kangaroo teeth from south-eastern Queensland suggests that 2.5–5 million years ago, the region was not arid as previously thought: here.

Although Amphicyon is known as the “bear dog,” this prehistoric mammal was directly ancestral to neither bears nor dogs: here.

Though ice flows are already growing, also in big canals, the river Rhine is still ice free.

I went to a point where a canal comes into the river, and where some waterbirds had gathered. I started throwing potatoe peels, apple peels, and pear peels into the water. The black-headed gulls and mallards immediately came to eat. Soon, a few coots arrived on the scene as well. However, the great crested grebes and great cormorants, being fish-eaters, did not bother.

A ring-necked parakeet, flying high overhead.

A few hundred meters further, in the canal near the anthropological museum, the same bird species came for the rest of the food. Also three semi-domestic geese, a semi-domestic duck, and juvenile and adult herring gulls this time.

The UN-sponsored global climate summit in Copenhagen staggered toward a finish Friday night, with representatives of the major world powers hoping to salvage a brief statement of principles, without a single binding commitment, before bringing the two-week conference to an end: here.

Greenpeace: Copenhagen, Denmark — Four of our activists face the prospect of Christmas in jail this year over charges relating to our crashing of the Head of State dinner at the Copenhagen climate summit, while the leaders who did practically nothing about the greatest threat to our planet got away scott free: here.

Environmentalists have denounced the results of the two-week climate conference in Copenhagen as “toothless” and “half-baked”: here.

Despite the urgency of finding a solution to global warming, the representatives of 193 states at the world climate conference in Copenhagen last week were utterly incapable of agreeing on any effective steps to reduce global levels of greenhouse gases: here.

Developing countries and unions globally have branded the Copenhagen climate summit as a “farce” and insisted that the threat posed by global warming required rich states to commit to binding emissions reductions: here.

Dr. Helen Caldicott, the pioneering Australian antinuclear activist and pediatrician who spearheaded the global nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s and co-founded Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), has joined with left-leaning environmental groups here in an uphill fight to halt nuclear power as a “solution” to the global warming crisis: here.